Ordinary Wolves (42 page)

“How about moose? We haven't got our moose.”

The driver rested his elbow on a powerful spotlight. They were
drifting away, idling into the current. Friendly Crotch Spit men, dying to kill their moose, their caribou, their bear, their wolves.

 

 

ONES DAY A
National Guard Black Hawk helicopter chopped over the valley. For a minute I questioned whether it was one of Crazy Joe's alleged helicopters, mapping subsurface minerals. The moose I'd watched all summer tucked in the willows at the mouth of Jesus Creek had grown huge antlers, and the flash of those antlers caught the helicopter pilot's eye. The thundering war machine slowed, turned, and swirled yellow leaves into the sky. It hovered over the willows of the creek.

In my binoculars I saw a man at the controls, peering down, then peering at dashboard buttons, marking this bend in the Kuguruk or entering the moose on a GPS. Maybe Billy was with him, or Nippy, or Dollie—half of Takunak was in the Guard. The helicopter racheted back toward Crotch Spit. My dogs howled. Thoughtfully, I hung the binocs on a limb in front of the igloo. A varied thrush raked leaves. He got me smiling, thinking birds must fake finding worms in this permafrost soil, pretending all that success in the rattling leaves.

A minute later the dot of an airplane appeared in the fall sky.

What is this? It must be Labor Day! Why don't they just call it Take-Break-And-Kill-Animals Day?

The plane circled. It didn't acknowledge my igloo, my smoke, my line of bright drying clothes. It circled the moose. The Super Cub banked and touched down on the bar below Jesus Creek. At the lower end the sand was soft and quick. The plane lurched suddenly onto its nose.

I rubbed my forehead, grinning, mulling mean versus generous thoughts, then put the
qayaq
in and paddled down. The water was glassy calm.

“We've got a problem!” the pilot shouted.

The man was big, a dentist from Anchorage, he said. “Get me to a phone and I'll give you a free root canal!” He ran in anxious circles under the towering tail. It was a photograph for Dawna:
Dentist with airplane.
Perfect
Alaskana. We heaved the tail down until the plane rested on three wheels. The prop was bent, but no other damage was apparent. I smelled the hot four-stroke oil and lusted to mechanic on the powerful engine. The man wore camouflage pants and a camouflage long-underwear shirt. I thought of the polar bear in glass at the Anchorage airport. Shot by an orthodontist.

“Biggest rack from here to Talketna!” He gloated. “Easily seventy inches. Buddy, it's right back in those willows.”

 

 

IT TOOK ME
all evening and the next morning to
qayaq
down to Takunak. Caribou swam the river. The sky spoke of wind, with lenticular clouds, and the willows and birches and tundra were crimson and gold beside the water, and the grass was yellow and bent, and mallards and widgeons nosed along the shores; it was all as haunting and beautiful as it had been ten thousand years before the evolution of sport hunters.

In Takunak a rush was in the air. Tommy Feathers was backing off shore, his boat listing and stacked with building materials to haul down to his native allotment. Three Washington brothers were climbing into a boat, carrying thermoses, SKS rifles, and a pair of Russian night-vision goggles. Two boys sat on a teeter-totter, watching me beach. They looked like street thugs, baggy clothes and shaved heads. “You a floater?” they asked listlessly. A “floater,” along the Kuguruk River, was one of two things: a pale rotten spawned-out salmon floating downriver, or a fluorescent nylon-clad Outsider come to float the river.

I hoped I wasn't either. I was embarrassed to be white and therefore in need of a category, and wrinkled my nose,
no.

They didn't hear. “You got cocaine?” I shook my head. The older boy spat. “You're so lucky. This town is the boringest place on earth. No roads. No good chicks here. Everything is native. So embarrassing. We're jus' waiting for the old people to die so we can go.”

“Go where?”

“Where you're from. States. France—unless they build a refineries. Cheap gas would be good, alright.”

A plastic Power Ranger lay half buried in the mud on his hands and knees, musclebound and begging. I stepped on the small of his back and stomped into Janet's, confused, the way she knew me best.

From Janet's phone, I called the troopers and the pilot's friend. Both phone numbers were busy. “Maybe rush hour season down there,” Janet said. She wore rubber boots, sweatpants, and an
atikłuk. “Arii.
Now George Push sure wanna fight Saddam Hussein.” She shook her head. “I don't want you boys to try go help.” The air smelled like strawberries. With his stump hand, Melt proudly pointed out a scented Plug-In. “Cutuk, 'lectric strawberry!”

Janet put boiled ribs and seal oil, bread and boysenberry jam, blueberries and sugar on the table. There were new pictures of Lumpy beside her Bible on top of the TV. “Lumpy have five kids,” she said proudly. “In Uktu.” She pushed back her gray hair. “Cutuk! Dawna's in Uktu! Flossie's daughter been have baby girl and they give it Dawna's Eskimo name. Maybe she gonna never go home now.”

The Super Cub on the sandbar flashed in my head. Whitney-Houston sat quiet, one hand on my leg, the other poking quilted buttons in the couch like linty navels. I put my arm around her shoulders and wiggled two fingers like rabbit ears. I pictured the cardboard box at home, with the black new camera and lenses lying in Styrofoam popcorn. I pictured Dawna a decade back, peering longingly at the brown parcels being tossed out of the Twin Otter's belly. Airplane words hissed through my head: “Prop wash,” “Retarded right mag,” “Grease those mains in!”

 

 

MY
QAYAQ
AND I
rode home in a flotilla of three boats and seven men. The men were jubilant at the prospects: hunting animals, burning Search & Rescue gas, saving a stupid white guy. We roared up to the sandbar.

The prop was off the red and white airplane, a dome tent pitched, the moose's huge head and antlers upside down drying on the sand. I panted with sadness. This bull moose had hung around last winter, for company in the lonely winter, the way moose often did. During the
summer I'd said hello whenever we passed along the shore of Outnorth Lake. Now a harem waited back in the willows, cow moose in love with this stud. Shooting him would have been as challenging and sporting as shooting a sofa. I lifted my
qayaq
out of Tommy Feathers's boat and walked to the skull. The skinned-out eyes and teeth scowled. Only the flap of head skin hung from the antlers, no thousand pounds of meat in sight. And I stood on the sand and wished, I just wished this fucking dentist could feel the other 364 days a year the moose had fought to live. How it felt to survive birth in the willows while brown bears waited; winter stands beside his mother against the wolves; survive years alone in wading deep snows, the willows buried, the tundra howling wind; survive the spring crust that dropped moose to their ribs while it supported big hungry bears; and the summer insanity of mosquitoes driving him to his eyeballs into water. All for the cool sweet fall and the chance of mating. While this dentist slept on flannel, mated whenever he felt a faint itch, bought bags of food at Safeway, and lived with a 99 percent assurance that his children would never be eaten. And planned his next adventure to kill an animal.

The men were cheerfully helping to install the propeller the man's friend had GoldStreaked north.

“This is a flat prop, an eighty-two forty-one,” he explained. “Forty-one inches forward for every revolution. A fast prop like the one I curled costs two thousand bucks.” He tie-wired the nuts expertly. “I'm going to save the whole head on Mr. Bigs. He's already cost me enough! See, I'm not sure about the crankshaft, so I'll need one of you to freight-collect that rack to me in Anchorage.”

The men stared.

Woodrow Washington Sr. sat on the edge of his boat glassing upriver for animals, avoiding the talking. I sat on his gunnel. The pilot paced, pointing out boot holes in the soft sand. Woodrow put his binoculars down and offered me a Tupperware of
muktuk,
a side of
paniqtuq
ribs. We sat eating with our knives, dodging juvenile maggots in the thicker parts of the half-dried caribou ribs. It was relaxing to be near a composed elder. The black
muktuk
was fresh. Woodrow pointed his knife at an electronic
gadget lying on his tarp. He chewed loose-lipped and swallowed finally. “Tat's my poy's elder-in-a-can.”

I examined the GPS. “Will this thing point at Uktu?”

Woodrow turned his head and looked instinctively in the direction of Uktu. He pointed his knife. “Could pe. If Woody been open it over there. Go 'head, turn it on. Maybe you'll pe lost tomorrow.”

The pilot's voice rose. “My crankshaft took a thump. This rack is heavy to tie to the struts. Tell you what. I was going to return for the meat, but if you'll freight that head out for me, you can keep all of it.”

I stood up, before he offered hundred-dollar bills or porcelain crowns in my front yard. My voice was harsher than I recognized. “We worry about game wardens. None of us have hunting licenses.”
Hunting
and
license
—the two words didn't go together. One was paper, and about distant Outsiders' rules. The other was the meat we were made out of. “You have to go with them and mail it yourself.”

The men nodded.

“I take you.” Woodrow stood. “Buy me twenty gallon.” He smiled his beautiful false teeth. “Maybe Evinrude oil too, huh?”

The big man stood dumbfounded. “No licenses? You guys
poach
everything?” The men glanced uncomfortably at the river. He peered at his watch. “Okay. Okay. I appreciate you, Cut—how you say your name?—going for help the way you did. That was really something else. All of you. Here, you don't have to eat that stuff.” He rifled his grub box and handed out sausages, mustard, canned ham, Coleman fuel, a science fiction paperback. He knelt and started meticulously salting and wrapping the moose head.

Nippy Sr. got hungry for moose ribs.

We tracked the blood trail into the willows. We heard the airplane engine stutter and roar as the man tested the engine. The animal lay big and brown as a woodpile, forlorn beside his guts, a yellow Kodak film wrapper, and no head. The carcass was hacked and dirty with leaves and sand, guts were spattered on the meat, flies buzzed. The men sniffed the sour blood and shook their heads. “Well. You got dog feed, Cutuk!” They laughed and strode out to gas up their motors.

The pilot filled sacks with sand to anchor the plane. As the boats idled into the current he was still shouting across the water, instructing me to swing the tail around if an east wind arose during the night. The boats roared upriver.

I sat, whistled with relief, and tossed pebbles into the creek. Sitting and thinking, the relief turned into ire. Eskimos' fame and favorite feature about themselves—besides hunter prowess—had always been shocking generosity. Without generosity, who were you? Nobody. Every day that generosity was strip-mined by Outsiders, many of them imitation hunters, most of them obscenely prosperous, until it had become harder and harder for us to come up with enough to even be ourselves.

“No wonder Abe gave away his airplane.”

The sun was warm on my neck. Slowly, I felt like Cutuk again, the little boy in the big wilderness. Before this constant thirst hiding between coffee and alcohol, sugar and sex. I wondered if I had always been afraid. All my life there had been power out there that made the decisions. It hadn't been so apparent when no man owned the land and we could laugh at storms and hunt harder. But now everything was square and electric and came off airplanes. And we lived here not really knowing what the power looked like, who it listened to, or how it held its fork.

I was tired of it. I didn't believe in it. I stood up and brushed sand off my butt. “I'm not going to be a dog. I'll take the wolf's deal.”

Abe's
qayaq
still lay in the sand beside the red and white airplane. Uktu was seventy-four miles southwest. GPS
guuq.
I dragged the tail of the plane around. I paddled to the house for the camera, let my dogs free, and went back and climbed into the cockpit.

Master switch. Mixture to full rich. Left magneto on. Starter button.
The engine sputtered and fired. Sand blew under the wings. My dogs' fur blew back and they retreated.
Right mag on.
The smell and roar and wind carried me back to Anchorage: January taking off with me in the back seat, my hands on the stick and throttle, feet under the seat on the cable pedals. Now the sandbar stretched in front. It ended at the dark water at the mouth of Jesus Creek. The narrow fuselage shuddered with power.
Always walk your strip,
January said. This sand was the soil of my life.
I'd walked it plenty. I shoved the throttle to full. The engine bellowed. The plane gathered itself. Bounding faster and faster. I eased the stick forward. The tail rose from the sand. Sky and water rushed toward me through the shaded circle of the propeller. Sun glinted on the river. Dead ahead was where Iris had nearly drowned. I yanked the flaps. The Super Cub plucked into the air.

Water rushed under the belly. Down in it fish darted away over the sandy bottom. I pulled the stick back and the plane climbed. I tilted the stick toward Uktu, pushed the right pedal; the wing banked, and the plane responded, turning south, rising gracefully.

Far across on the north shore was the igloo and the fling of caches and fish racks and woodpiles, and behind, lakes and tundra. No boats were in sight on the river. Below lay maroon tundra and tiny bristled spruce and birches flagged in yellow. The Shield Mountains were ahead, hardly mountains anymore, now only stubbled hills with stone outcroppings, and beyond them an endless expanse of tundra. Ancient and new caribou trails cut hillsides and forked across marshes and up mountains, veins on the land.